Stratasys Vs. The People - Intellectual Property

Chris Carroll wrote an interesting editorial for 3DPrint.com discussing Stratasys' rights to protect their IP. He brings in Taylor Swift, Apple and the DMCA into the story and ends with the conclusion that Stratasys has every right to not want to open up their intellectual property to the world after having spect tens of millions of dollar on R&D. Do you agree with Carroll? If not, why not? More details and the full editorial by Carroll can be found here: http://3dprint.com/77101/taylor-swift-3d-printing/


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They have every right to protect anything they invent as does anyone else. There should however be changes made in the law that prevent them stealing other people's work and claiming it as their own.

IPR is one of the best things there is for getting investment so we have a situation where everyone and his mother patents things that are just common sense, the rules that applied to patents in the past are mostly ignored if you are a big company and if you are not then you can't afford to patent and even if you did you cannot afford to defend.

"First to file" is another of those American inventions that needs putting right up the nether bits of the guys that thought about it.

Patents were laid down in order that the small person did not lose out to the big people but the invention was not kept secret thus allowing other people to develop the ideas, theoretically excellent but sadly marred by the parasites in the legal business.

Keep the patents, shoot the lawyers and all would be good.

Obviously this has nothing to do with protecting their intellectual property. They have sold their printers to anybody that would pay the price and they want those people to use the printers to make what ever their little hearts desire. What they don't want is for these people to use other (reasonably priced) sources for the filament. So... They have gone to great lengths, and have in fact invested a lot of money to create intellectual property to make it difficult to use other sources of material. They have gone so far as to try to lock out the user that paid money to own the Statasys printer from even using it how they want to use it.

I suggest that it would make sense to schedule Chris Carrol to come here at a pre-announced time to field questions from people that don't believe this is all about 'Protecting Intellectual Property'.

Specifically, the question I have for him is this: If your filament is so good and definitely worth the price, why would you even be concerned about people using other sources for the filament? Why do you have to force people to use your filament? Is it perhaps because it really isn't worth the price you charge?

To me, it doesn't seem like they're fighting for their IP as much as they're fighting for the revenue stream coming from their consumables. If people are allowed to "jailbreak" their printers and use any consumables they want, then Stratasys would be out a lot of downstream money. Although 2D and 3D printers use a considerably different process, one can make an analogy between them in this case. 2D printers, coming from a traditional industrial company, have used the Gilette model of monetization: sell the razor cheaply, but make the only blades that fit it, and keep the profit margins high on them. 2D ink-jet printers sell for very little, often under $100, but it's been estimated that the ink for them sells for more than fine Caspian Beluga caviar, ounce-by-ounce.

Naturally, this is an attractive business model for any company interested in making money. But many of the current wave of inexpensive 3D printers have their roots in a "Makers" movement, coming from a vision of self-replicating DIY machines that are cheap to make and use in any way the makers see fit. Most of them are capable of using any filament that fits in their extruders, and despite the potential advantages of proprietary filaments that can be quality controlled tightly, loaded into cartridges and fitted with chips that automatically set the printers' parameters, they like the economy of using inexpensive bulk materials. Hence the push-back that is exemplified in this drive to open up these closed proprietary platforms. Yes, there's doubtless some IP involved in the creation of these chips and cartridges, and the firmware that controls their use, but the main issue is whether the creator of a machine or its end user should be able to decide how it's used.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

Comparing stratasys to talor swift is also an apples to oranges thing. In the case of music, Taylor Swift is sticking up for the small guys, ensuring that a big powerful company cannot do what they please with the art of individual artists.

Here we have again, a big powerful company stratasys trying to control what users of thier system can do with their own studio made art. So I think Taylor swift would again, (hopefully) side with the small guys and put an end to this filament embargo.

It is not good to consider the filament that goes in the printer to be a part of the machine itself. Is oil or gas a part of the car, or a consumable? What if Shell made a car that had an electronic chip so it would only collect gas from a matching shell pump? Don't think so . . .

This is only going to cause stratasys more problems. If you look at eBay you wills see everyone trying to dump their stratasys machines because the filament is so expensive.

Don't parade around with this 'it's all one end solution' kind of stuff when we know that the prices are only meant to increase revenues. It's a business move and everyone knows that. In the end, whats good for the market will prevail, and that will be interchangeable filament in its own market with established codes and standards, different grades, etc.

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Originally Posted by awerby

If people are allowed to "jailbreak" their printers and use any consumables they want, then Stratasys would be out a lot of downstream money.

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Yeah? So what? They already made their money selling the printer. So what if people want to use a filament they don't supply? What are they going to do?

Oh! Wait! We know the answer! They are going to scream "Those people are infringing on the intellectual property we developed! We put stuff in they way to make it difficult to buy filament from anybody but us. And they are reverse engineering and defeating that technology. Anybody that doesn't want to buy filament from us is a FELON !"

Guess where I land on this subject???

I looked at Stratasys when our business was looking into 3D printing. Their printers are expensive, no doubt, but what really put me off was the price and availability of consumables. We live in South Africa (i.e. far from the rest of the world) getting filament is expensive (shipping, taxes, countless middlemen), takes long and there is only one reseller (no competition). There were, in my opinion, extreme limitations to an other good product.

We settled on a Flashforge Creator X. Owning it we have learnt that with a fair bit of fine tuning and optimization, along with the application of some post-print elbow grease and spraypaint, we have been able to produce beautiful professional looking prints.

Oh yeah, another thing... the real innovators in the 3D print world (dare I say inventors?) are 3D Systems. Not Stratasys. Not by a long shot.

In the wake of discussion about Stratasys' IP protection rights, Michael Weinberg has contributed his voice to the conversation. As the author of the petition before the US Copyright Office, Weinberg brings a unique knowledge to the table. He states that Stratasys does not, in fact, have the right to protect the materials used in their machines, harking back to the example Lexmark provided in the 2D printing arena. Read his full opinion here: http://3dprint.com/77334/3d-printing-copyright-office/

Thanks for the follow-up article link. Although the article says people in the comments here are misunderstood it seems to me like everyone agrees that this is not the kind of thing that should be protected by DMCA.

I used the DMCA to get counterfit ebay listings removed that were intimating my products and claiming they were my brand. If I were to follow the same logic as stratasys then I would be able to go after products that did not even match, since they would be cutting into my profits. It's a laughable mis-interpretation, only able to exist because of the software on the chips. It's that clause about reverse-engineering a copy-written piece of code that allows this whole argument to exist.

But what I don't understand is that, how does the copyright cover the distribution of filaments? It only covers the hacking of the device, right? So technically everyone would be able to sell the filaments, it's just then they would be encouraging the hacking of the chips, and thus the lawbreaking, outlawish behavior of good-to-do printshops?

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Originally Posted by Brian_Krassenstein

In the wake of discussion about Stratasys' IP protection rights, Michael Weinberg has contributed his voice to the conversation. As the author of the petition before the US Copyright Office, Weinberg brings a unique knowledge to the table. He states that Stratasys does not, in fact, have the right to protect the materials used in their machines, harking back to the example Lexmark provided in the 2D printing arena. Read his full opinion here: http://3dprint.com/77334/3d-printing-copyright-office/

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